The Vogue Interview: Alicia Vikander

Alicia Vikander is as famous for her reserve as she is for her extraordinary drive but, as Tom Lamont discovered in the August 2016 issue of Vogue, the actress's desire to change the world sits alongside a wicked sense of humour.

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Good thing that the financiers and insurers of Alicia Vikander's next few films can't see this. On a rented pedal bike, the actress negotiates three-lane traffic in the South of France. With a Louis Vuitton handbag in her front basket and a phone in her right hand, she half-watches the road, while reading a 3G map. No helmet - the 27-year-old Swede's chestnut hair flutters around her shoulders, whooshed sideways now and then by overtaking trucks. At the traffic lights, she is forced into a thicket of growling Citroëns. Unquestionably, this actress is gutsy - witness her fierce, uninhibited performance in The Danish Girl, which won her best supporting actress at the Academy Awards in February - but she is not suicidal. She wobbles her bike to the nearest patch of pavement. "Let's walk for a while," she says.

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We're exploring Toulon, a port on the Mediterranean where Vikander is making a new film, Submergence, about marine scientists. The cast has been given some time off today and Vikander has chosen to spend it biking with Vogue. It is late April, a fortnight since she was shot for this magazine's cover on a beach in the south-east of England. Over the 14 days since then, Vikander has managed to cram in trips to Stockholm to celebrate a friend's 30th, and to Oslo where her boyfriend, the actor Michael Fassbender, is filming a movie. She swung through Berlin (shooting prep for Submergence) then Normandy (rehearsal with co-star James McAvoy) and landed in Toulon a few days ago - disembarking, right away, to film boat scenes on the Med.

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I feel tired just hearing that, I tell her. "I was speaking to my dad on the phone about it this morning," Vikander says. "He said, 'You're a stabil flicka', and I got what he meant. It's a Swedish phrase - like a girl who loves horses. A stablegirl. My dad said to me, 'You're living a lot. But, actually, when you get back to work on set, that's when you feel the most relaxed. You're in your stable.'" Does it strike her there is something a little mournful about being a stabil flicka? "I don't think so," Vikander answers briskly, not offended but not agreeing with the interpretation either. "Working makes me happy, makes me calm." She acknowledges there's an element of escapism to this. Academy Awards don't win themselves and Vikander campaigned as diligently as any other actor to be recognised by her peers. "The last year was pretty tough. Doing more interviews. Events. Being public. I think that's why I like working. Being here [on set], waking up to work, the same 60 people around you every day on a shoot. I like that stillness."

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She's hardly had a chance to think over the night she won. She recalls what she can, episodes that haven't been lost to the day's nerves and adrenaline. Getting ready in her hotel room with friends and family, everyone in dressing gowns ("It felt like my wedding"). The little orange robot from Star Wars rolling around the green room. Taking a big troop of pals around the after-parties. Leaving her mobile phone in an Uber cab before she'd had a chance to reply to all the congratulatory texts. Looking down at her Oscar, at one point, and biting it. Biting it? "To check. That it wasn't made of chocolate or something."

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As her father says, she's a stabil flicka: Vikander was back at work almost immediately. There were reshoots to be done on the new Bourne movie, in which she co-stars with Matt Damon, the fifth in the hugely successful franchise, her first major blockbuster. In the new instalment (Jason Bourne, out this month), Vikander plays a computer specialist - "I tell other people to run," she says - while Damon does his action thing. Back in the Nineties, he won a career-transforming Oscar himself, when he was exactly Vikander's age. "He told me what a rush it was. I think his was the best advice. He said, 'Enjoy it.'"

She seems to be today - laughing a lot, smiling a lot, getting tooted at on her bike in caveman-appreciation by passing men in their cars, and finding this a bit crude but at the same time a bit funny, too. She used to be kept awake at night before interviews, she says, tortured and anxious. It can't have helped that interviewers often wrote her off as guarded, even icy. (A headline on one of her New York Times interviews read: "There's no easy way to get inside Alicia Vikander's head".) Some of this she attributes to a problem of tone. "Being able to be dry in a second language is almost the last thing you learn," she admits. Her English is excellent now. There are a few endearing slips ("Moving from one to B"), but she has her dryness down and is free in her use of the F-word. She considers her answers to questions carefully, and has clearly drawn boundaries about what she will and won't discuss. But she's easy company. Clever and quick with an anecdote. At times a bit of a goof.

While we bike around, Vikander cheerfully admits that as a 15-year-old she bought and prized a fake Louis Vuitton bag - she confessed as much to artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière, she says, when she became the official face of the brand last May. When I ask about what she's wearing today, she deadpans a red-carpet run-down of her outfit (T-shirt by the Swedish-American label Ragdoll, trainers by Nike, jeans unknown), including a namecheck for her underpants by French supermarket Casino. She has a lovely, honking, unselfconscious laugh and dispenses it liberally, for instance when we freewheel down a gravel path and find ourselves on a beach full of topless sunbathers. "You set this up," she accuses, grinning, "because of my Swedish heritage."

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Vikander was raised in Gothenburg, and had an unconventional childhood. Her mother, a stage actress, separated from her father, a psychiatrist, when she was very young. Vikander was raised between their houses - an only child when she was with her mother, the middle sister in an enormous brood at her father's house. "My dad has children by four different mothers," Vikander explains, matter-of-factly. "The youngest is 15 now." You'd expect this might have been a distressing situation but Vikander insists not. Always close to both her parents, she says they remain "very good friends". Vikander tells a story about being interviewed, as a teenager, for a Swedish documentary about children of divorce. After she told her story, she recalls, the producer said they couldn't use it. You weren't traumatised enough? "Exactly! I thought, 'But wouldn't it be good for other teenagers to hear someone talk about it in a positive way?'"

Transitioning between the two childhood arrangements - life with her mother an intimate two-hander; with her father a more raucous ensemble piece - proved a kind of training for Vikander's later career, where she might work for weeks on closed, intense sets then suddenly be asked to wow in public settings. I noticed at Vogue's shoot how crisply Vikander could adjust from her role as model (precise, pliant, aware of the light) to a floppier, much younger presence in the dressing room.

Vikander learnt tenacity as a ballet dancer, doing 10 years until the age of 18 at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. She switched from dancing to acting because of what she calls "burn". She stopped burning for ballet. Instead, at 20, she got the lead in a Swedish film called Pure, an intense coming-of-age drama that asked of Vikander lots of naked emotion (some nakedness, too). The film won her a major award in Sweden. Burning to keep acting, she moved to London and auditioned for English-speaking roles.

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Friends describe Vikander in this period as determined. "Her work ethic was insane," say Aino Jawo and Caroline Hjelt, known now as the electropop band Icona Pop. Jawo and Hjelt met Vikander in Sweden, and later shared a flat with her in Notting Hill. This was around 2011. While Jawo and Hjelt went out, Vikander paced her room for hours, practising accents. "She was so focused. We were like, 'You need to sleep!'"

Vikander, for her part, does not remember this as an especially happy time. It took her years to develop any real affection for London. (She is now settled in north London where she has just bought a new home.) She felt lonely and missed her friends back in Sweden. "I worried about them still being there when I went back." Things have got better, she says, now that "the world is smaller, with Skype, with Facetime". But as for returning? She hasn't had much opportunity. "I've planned two or three times to have chunks of time off - and then a project comes along."

In 2011, Vikander was cast by Joe Wright in his adaptation of Anna Karenina. "She seemed very young, very bright," the director remembers. "A relentless perfectionist." That same year she was in a Danish period drama, an exquisite film called A Royal Affair that was nominated for best foreign language film at the Oscars. (A very different night out at the Awards, as Vikander recalls: "A lot of dancing, a lot of alcohol and, oh my god, yeah, a lot of unfiltered cigarettes.") She made Testament of Youth, based on Vera Brittain's memoir, and appeared in Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. reboot. In 2015, she was adoringly reviewed in Alex Garland's Ex Machina, a sci-fi film set in the near future. She played Ava, a robot with advanced artificial intelligence. In one scene, Ava confesses a fear that if she does not pass certain tests, does not impress people, she would simply be switched off. Is that ever what it feels like, I ask Vikander - this job? "You have the fear," she admits. "Maybe that's why I keep on working. Because it will stop one day."

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In deciding which films she'll make, Vikander says she's steered by two influential forces. Her parents' opinion (she emails them scripts) and her gut. These two authorities don't always pull together. In 2014, Vikander auditioned with the director Tom Hooper for a part in The Danish Girl. She would play Gerda Wegener, wife of Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne), the first known person to undergo gender confirmation surgery. The part was hers if she wanted it. But there was another film in the offing - The Light Between Oceans, a drama about a pair of lighthouse-keepers, directed by Derek Cianfrance. Michael Fassbender had signed on. "There was a time when I wasn't going to be able to do both," Vikander recalls. At the last moment there was a fortuitous scheduling change. The two films were key to her life as it is now. The Danish Girl won her the Oscar. And it was during filming on The Light Between Oceans that she began a relationship with Fassbender.

The 39-year-old Irishman has a not insubstantial list of exes and his relationship with Vikander generated plenty of curiosity when word spread about it in late 2014. In spring 2015, about six months after filming wrapped on A Light Between Oceans, the New York Times asked Vikander if the pair were a couple. She would not confirm or deny. In interview after interview, the same refusal. But in February, Vikander and Fassbender sat next to each other at the Oscars. Even snatched a quick kiss when she won.

Did that seem like an unravelling of a lot of careful discretion, I ask, to choose to sit next to each other at the ceremony? "No!" She laughs. "That wasn't even a question. It felt like the right thing. We wanted to sit next to each other, simple as that. We wouldn't have gone there and not sat together."

It's lunchtime: we park our bikes at a restaurant on the shore. Vikander suggests a seafood platter to share and we're brought an enormous tray of oysters and prawns and sea snails. A pile of shells and skins amass as we tear through it. I ask her, what next? When you've got your Oscar at 27, what else is there? Vikander says, "Now you use it."

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She talks about a production company she's launching called Vikarious; one of its goals is to make films with female leads and female creatives. In the first production on its slate, a drama about two sisters called Euphoria, she'll co-star alongside Eva Green; the director and screenwriter is Lisa Langseth, who cast Vikander in that early Swedish film, Pure. In only a few years working in the Swedish film industry, Vikander points out, she was in three films directed by women. Since Anna Karenina launched her on English-language cinema, she's made 11 films - all by men. In some she didn't have a single scene with another woman. Her intention is to "change the culture. That's the biggest gift I've been given, and I think I can make a difference with it." (Wright, when he hears this, says: "I do think one day we'll all be working for Alicia.") Meantime, she's been cast as Lara Croft in a new Tomb Raider film - that one, sadly, not to be directed by a woman. She still has a culture to change.

After lunch, we cycle back in the direction of the hire shop. There are a few wrong turnings, lots of tooting cars, an ascent up a coastal hill - which Vikander tackles, I notice, while maintaining a perfectly straight-backed carriage. There's one last hairy moment, at a final crossroads, when we accidentally steer our bikes into the path of a moving bus. Only one of us opts to brake and reverse inelegantly to safety. The other wheels on forward, nerveless and serene. When I finally catch up with Vikander she's already back at the shop, dismounting, propping her bike on its stand, waiting with a patient smile.